Make Room for the Caddy

Since homes continue to be built with attached garages - with no change in sight - builders and contractors need to understand how to minimize the risk of CO poisoning.

Most homeowners would object to dedicating a room in their house to a cow. Yet the majority of houses in this country are constructed with a room dedicated to shelter a far more smelly and deadly beast: the family car. Lawsuits related to attached garages abound. The separation between the place where the people live and the place where the car is stored must be much more clearly defined. In colonial times, houses were often built over a shelter for animals—the first tuck-unders. The animals added warmth to the home. Having to put up with the animal odor was a small price to pay. With the advent of the automobile in the 1890s, and of the attached garage in the 1930s, convenience far outweighed the problem of gases and odors from the car. There was enough natural ventilation in homes to remove the harmful gases. Even as houses became tighter, there was an intuitive sense among people that the garage should be considered and treated as exterior space.This made it an acceptable place to store the car, the lawn ...